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Tips for writing poems kids read

If you like to write poetry and like to keep company with children, you might enjoy writing poems for kids. These tips will help:

Get to know children of all ages well.

Find out what encourages, worries, or speaks to kids from preschool through teen years. Being around your unique readers will help you to know how to write for a particular age group, but you can also research their most likely areas of interests and typical stages of child development. For example, most children are interested in animals and nature, but often fear spiders! Fortunately, facts and fun can help to overcome those fears.

Questions for a Spider

Spider, Spider,eight-legged glider,how do you spin those threads?You don’t have a needleto wheedle a beetle,so what do you use instead?

Spider, Spider,insecticider,how does your sticky web spin?Can you duck from the guckwithout getting stuck?How do you get out and in?

Include Mother Goose nursery rhymes and other classics but focus primarily on contemporary poems written with kids in mind.

Keep each line in line with the age of your readers.

The younger the child, the simpler a poem needs to be. For instance, young children love a regular rhythm or bouncy beat. Since they’re learning words themselves, toddlers and preschoolers like the sounds of words such as those sound echoes they can easily hear in rhyme and alliteration.

Turn up the volume.

By repeating the first sound of a word within a line, the resulting alliteration will enliven the sound and tempo of your poem. For example, “Big, bright beads of rain wet down the window.” If you carry sounds to extreme, alliteration creates kid-friendly tongue twisters such as “Suzy sells seashells by the seashore.” (Guess Suz didn’t live in FL where shells can be found for free 🙂

Use strong nouns and active verbs for your rhyming pairs.

The nouns you choose can quickly sketch a picture of a person, place, or thing for the child to envision. The active verbs will then move those noun-pictures along. For instance, a rhyme of “bird/ stirred” brings to mind all sorts of possibilities you can play with as you create sense with sounds. However, word pairs such as “of/ above” and “in/ when” do not provide a clear sound, a clear picture, nor a clear meaning for anything.

Develop a sense of play.

Good-natured humor appeals to all ages of readers, but the catch comes in knowing what a preschooler, kindergartner, elementary school child, junior high kid, or older teen will find amusing, especially since that can change from one age level to the next or one mood to the next! For instance, a child needs to be able to read to enjoy the wordplays and line breaks in this poem:

All Broken Up!

Hey! What’s going on tonight?My fingernail broke.A bird broke into flight,and, oh! The mirror broke!Will it be all right?Then someone breaks the silence.

I went to bed closing my eyes to these sights –hoping and praying the breaks might not last,then morning brokedaybreak into dawn-light, and I happily hopped down to break-fast.

Purposeful repetition will help children to join in the fun, get playfully involved in your poem, and remember information. Similar to the refrain of a song, a poem’s refrain can be the same from one verse to the next. Or, vary a word or two each time to develop your theme fully and keep readers interested.

Read each poem aloud.

Tap out the beat. If the rhythm gets too regular, the poem will sound like a nursery rhyme. That’s perfect if you write for nursery school children but not for older kids, teens, or young adults, who might be more apt to like free verse freed of regular rhyme, rhythm, and other patterns.

Read aloud each version and revision of a poem.

Does anything seem “off” in the sound, sense, or rhythm? If so, keep playing with words, sound echoes, or line breaks until you find what works for the poem.

Mary Harwell Sayler has received an ALA Nonfiction Award and a Pushcart nomination for poetry. As a freelance and assignment writer primarily for Christian and educational publishers, she’s placed 30 books in all genres and over 2,500 poems, articles, devotionals, and children’s stories. She’s also written 3 Kindle e-books for poets and writers. In 2012 Hiraeth Press published her first poetry book, Living in the Nature Poem, and in 2014, Kelsay Books, published her Bible-based poems Outside Eden and her first book of children’s poems, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes. In March 2017, Cladach Press published her poetry book, PRAISE! and in September, Finishing Line Press will release her poetry chapbook, WE: the people under God.